This dissertation interrogates the political significance of science and technology in the contemporary world as well as their challenge to our understanding of democracy. It provides a critical examination and integration of contributions from the fields of political theory—represented here by Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ranci?re, and theorists of deliberative democracy—and ‘science and technology studies’—particularly the works of Brian Wynne, Bruno Latour, and Michel Callon. At the center of the investigation is the question of amor mundi, understood as the sense of care for the world as a place fit for the mutually enforcing appearance of new subjects and objects in the public scene. Acknowledging how the doings of technoscientists increasingly shape and structure our conditions of existence below the radar of conventional politics, and the challenge this poses to democratic ideals of self-determination, it is further argued that science and technology are a complex form of agency that unsettles inherited conceptual categories and blurs traditional demarcations between nature and the human artifice. From the splitting of the atom afforded by the development of quantum mechanics to the creation of new life forms in the field of synthetic biology, the activities of technoscientists are forms of acting into nature and making socio-technical hybrids whose proliferation has not been sufficiently addressed and recognized. Furthermore, the agency of technoscience qua expertise tends to frame the scope of public debate along narrow scientistic parameters of control, prediction, and standardization, signaled by the dominance of ‘risk’ discourses in the public sphere. The recent profusion of deliberative forums for engaging lay publics with science is shown to be inadequate for confronting this challenge. In the light of contemporary instances of democratic practice around technoscience—exemplarily represented by the case of AIDS-treatment activism—an alternative form of democratic politics is proposed around the two related concepts of ’interference’ and ‘composition.’

The contemporary revival of interest in republican political thought requires a substantive account of civic virtue as its motivating factor. Whereas liberalism will replace the burden of virtue with the burden of dispassionate judgment, republicanism clings to the potential of its citizenry's virtuosity and the idea that something akin to character is required to participate in politics. I argue that to enliven virtue, we must consider its relationship to the passions and their place in the historical republican tradition. Civic virtue's influence on republican practices derives not from juridical principles or institutional safeguards but from ethical and emotional commitments to extra-legal concepts such as duty, respect, and responsibility. Yet the contemporary literature on republicanism, suffering from what I call an affective deficit, largely fails to account for this emotional dimension. Building on the theory of emotives developed by historian William Reddy in 'The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions' (2001), and through a series of close readings of republican political thought from the eighteenth century, I develop a distinct theory of affective practices, defined as the ways in which feelings of devotion to one's country and fellow citizens are cogitated upon, judged, enacted in the body and communicated to others. I apply this theory of affective practices to provide interpretations of Montesquieu on fear; Diderot on despair and respect; and Rousseau on love and sympathy. Through these explorations, we may better understand how the passions, and a re-politicized sense of civic virtue, are, and ought to be, employed in the pursuit, maintenance, and critique of republican politics by its contemporary defenders and detractors alike, particularly in Philip Pettit's work on neo-republicanism and J�rgen Habermas's on constitutional patriotism.

This dissertation situates the emergence of revolutionary resistance in Pahlavi Iran in parallel with the emergence of neoliberal political rationality in the Middle East. In the process, it theorizes neoliberalism anew. Through an engagement with archives of social practice in Iran and its diaspora between 1968 and 1979, neoliberalism is presented as a political rationality that involves rhetorical disavowal at root --- what I refer to as indeterminate governmentality. The study employs parallelism as a theoretical construct reflecting the logic of the revolutionary transformation and periodic shift at hand. The disavowals considered include renderings of a collective on individualist terms; formations of solidarity through empathy; and orientations toward order in the production of disorder. The archival material considered includes state documents; activist records, ephemera, and publications; theoretical texts; literature; popular cinema; periodicals; and ethnographic interviews. In sum, I argue that an event variably labelled Iranian or Islamic may just as well be understood as the first neoliberal revolution.

Initiated by Beijing college students, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests—"Tiananmen"—shook all of China with their calls for democratic and social reforms. They were violently repressed by the Chinese state on June 4, 1989. Since then, their memory has been subject within the country to two kinds of censorship. First, a government campaign promulgating the official narrative of Tiananmen, while simultaneously forbidding all others, lasted into 1991. What followed was the surcease of Tiananmen propaganda and an expansion of silencing to nearly all mentions that has persisted to this day. My dissertation examines fiction and film that evoke Tiananmen from within mainland China and Hong Kong. It focuses on materials that are particularly open to a self-reflexive reading, such as literature in which the protagonists are writers and films shot without authorization that in their editing indicate the precarious circumstances of their making. These works act out the contestation between the state censorship of Tiananmen-related discourse on the one hand and its alternative imagination on the other, thereby opening up a discursive space, however fragile, for a Chinese audience to reconfigure a historical memory whose physical space is off limits.

The dissertation is organized historically by time, place, and medium. Chapter 1 focuses on a Chinese state-sponsored collection of literary reportage published shortly after the June Fourth crackdown that, in my rereading today when the entire state literature on Tiananmen is itself marginalized, allows for an untimely commemoration of the protests. Chapter 2 looks at the same immediate post-June Fourth period in a Hong Kong approaching the 1997 reversion to Chinese sovereignty, analyzing the recoding of Tiananmen in two audiovisual works, in particular, that question the possibility of a Hong Kong public in the face of collusive pressure from Chinese and British authorities. Chapters 3 and 4 consider fiction and film, respectively, that illustrate the historicity and medium specificity of censorship and its contestation. The two mainland novels that I read in Chapter 3, one published in print and the other online, create sites both where the elided memory of 1989 can reenter and where a participatory readership can emerge. Chapter 4 concerns two fiction-features whose different trajectories of production and exhibition across the mainland-Hong Kong divide demonstrate the Chinese state's continual displacement of Tiananmen. As a whole, the four chapters reveal the dual aspect of censorship and its effects, both the authorized pronouncements that set its terms of engagement in making the _censored_ public (Chapter 1) as well as the unauthorized reworkings generated within its sphere of influence that make the censored _public_ (Chapters 2-4).

My dissertation seeks to intervene in current debates about both comparative perspectives within Latin American literatures and the place of Latin America within new models of world literature. Despite the importance of this call to a more planetary approach to literature, the turn to a world scope often recapitulates problems associated with the nineteenth century emergence of the term "world literature": local concerns and traditions dissolve into the search for general patterns or persistent dependencies. If these new comparative models tend to separate the local from the construction of literature's "world," significant strains of Latin Americanist criticism have also sought to distance the local from literature and the literary, often identifying the latter alternatively with either the collapse of previous emancipatory dreams or a complicity with power and domination. Focusing on two pairs of narrative texts by the Brazilian Clarice Lispector and the Argentine Juan José Saer, I argue for a more contested notion of the literary and of the world.

Lispector's and Saer's narrative texts intertwine the literary construction of their worlds with local forms of alterity and otherness. Despite the differences between Saer's attention to an apparently more circumscribed local world in the littoral zone of Santa, Fe, Argentina, and Lispector's more seemingly abstract flights from place, their writing nonetheless meets in common spaces and experiences that have little to do with either a recognizably "Latin American" aesthetics or the generality of a world model free from contradiction, suffering, and the traces of history. In part one, on Lispector's A paixão segundo G.H. (1964) and A hora da estrela (1977), and part two on Saer's El entenado (1983) and El río sin orillas (1990), I explore the different ways that their writing represents, or contains, the possibility of altering the world and selves in literature. While the dictatorship period negatively inflects both A hora da estrela and El entenado, I argue that the inscription of their literary worlds into local, national, and regional traditions becomes a resource for more subtle connections between the texts and the periods, calling into question the attempts to make literature tell a story of either collapse or hope at the end of the last century.